Hack into My Heart
by Guilty-As-Battery-Charged
Summary: Based on a Tumblr-developed idea. A web hacker on the run hides out at Litwak's Arcade, where she quickly makes herself useful in the short time she's able to stay. She also leaves a mark on a certain wrecker, who doesn't realize his feelings for the newcomer are doomed ones.


This is based an idea I developed on Tumblr, in which a professional, benevolent hacker from the web, being hunted down by shady figures who want to use their skills for evil purposes, hides out in Litwak's Arcade for a while and gets to briefly experience safety, security, and happiness among the inhabitants. The key word here, unfortunately, is "briefly." It's meant to be completely separate from "Rewriting the Program."

* * *

 **Hack into My Heart:** **A Wreck-It Ralph Story**

* * *

Her clothes didn't quite fit her right. That was the first thing Surge Protector noted about her. Visitors from the web were usually better dressed, in what _they_ called "the latest styles." This young woman's dress style seemed to be aiming more towards "lost and found bin raid."

He decided not to dwell on it. The girl's fashion sense, or lack thereof, were not his concern. Little did he know that her wardrobe was so mismatched because everything article of clothing she owned was filched from games in which she'd hidden, hacked into, or taken down. She couldn't buy clothes. They would be able to track her down easily if she made purchases with a credit card. She had to salvage what she had and make do.

Surge lowered his gaze down to his clipboard and clicked open his pen. "I was told your name is…Anna Webster."

"Yes." A good, plain, innocuous name. Hopefully, it would stick and hold.

"Can I see your identification?" She had good connections in the Dark Web. The Surge could find nothing wrong with her false ID card and character reference papers.

"It says here that you're a journalist?" he asked.

"Yes."

"And what's your business in the arcade?"

"Writing." The Surge raised an eyebrow. "I'm working on an important series of articles and I can't concentrate on the web. Too many distractions. An arcade is nice and quiet."

"Ha. That's what you think," Surge Protector joked dryly as he made a note on his clipboard. "And where will you be staying?"

"Fix-It Felix Jr. I'm renting one of the townhouses in East Niceland. The characters know I'm coming."

"Alrighty, then," the Surge Protector concluded. "You may proceed. Though I must warn you, I doubt you'll find any quiet in _that_ game. The main character has a small army of small children."

"I don't mind children." It was the adults she was wary of. The adults who might find something, anything suspicious about her and investigate. She would have to be careful. She would have to be on her guard, and not let anyone get too close to her. She wasn't here to make close friends or attract attention. She was here to keep a low profile and blend in.

* * *

Felix insisted that Anna Webster come to dinner. He wouldn't take no for an answer. "Ma'am, what kind of good guy would I be if I didn't show my game's newest guest some good old-fashioned hospitality?"

It had been so long since she'd eaten dinner with anyone. The last time had been with Shank, secretly splitting a sandwich in the attic where the star racer had hidden her. She had peeked out at Slaughter Race through the shutters, watching with a slight pang of envy as the characters went about their business and lived their lives, uninterrupted and unpursued. She would never have that.

"She's new," she had remarked, pointing at the little pony-tailed girl playing fetch with a mutt.

"That's Vanellope. She joined a few months ago," Shank said. "I've programmed her into the game, so she'll regenerate if anything happens. Thank you for teaching me how to do that."

"No problem," the hacker replied, still spying on the racer urchin. "She's glitching. A lot. Do you want me to fix that?"

Shank shook her head. "No, thank you."

"It will only take a few minutes. Ten minutes tops."

"I don't think she wants it fixed. It's her 'superpower' and it's part of who she is. But if she changes her mind, I will contact you."

"If you can find me." It was unlikely she would be here in a few days' time. Slaughter Race was a poor choice for a safe haven. It was too popular, and too many websites tracked its activities. She'd only come here in the first place because Shank was a good friend and she had badly missed being near a good friend. She would have to move on soon, or be caught.

Shank smiled at that. "Yes, if I can find you," the racer echoed, a little sadly. She was used to people feeling sorry for her and the life she'd fallen into. It was a deep, dark pit she couldn't climb out of. All she could do was dig and make it deeper.

Shank had wanted her to stay longer than planned. Shank had wanted to introduce her to Vanellope. But she said no. "It's probably better if she never knew I was here."

Same with everyone else, she insisted to Shank, who was the only person in Slaughter Race who knew her real name or had seen her face. Everyone else only knew her, or knew _of_ her, by her world-famous hacker name. If anyone asked, she was never there.

At dinner that night, Anna Webster was introduced to all fifteen of the Fix-It children, and to Felix's wife, Sergeant Calhoun of Hero's Duty. "Pleased to meet you. You have a lovely home."

"You should see it after Ralph wrecks it!" one of the children cried out, and the others sniggered. Sergeant Calhoun shushed them.

"Ralph is our game's bad guy," Felix explained as he took Anna's trench coat which, he noticed, had clearly been made for a man. Internet fashion sure was unconventional. "He's out right now, but you'll meet him later."

Anna found herself slotted in between two of the children at the apartment's lengthy dining room table. As Felix served the soup and the bread rolls were passed around, the other children stared at her curiously.

"So, rough trip down the wire, Anna?" Sergeant Calhoun asked her.

"A bit." Not at all, actually. She had traveled worse. Much worse. Comfort was not part of a hacker's life, by no means. "I passed by some people going to the web."

"Ohhhhhhh, yes. Everyone's got web fever!" Felix exclaimed as he took his own seat at the head of the table. Ever since Litwak got the router, everyone's been heading off to the internet to visit games or catch movies at Nextfix."

"Netflix, Dad," the white-haired girl corrected him.

"Yes, that's what I said. Netflix." His daughter rolled her eyes. Anna took a spoonful of soup. Mmmmmmm, bliss. She hadn't had a hot meal in so long.

"We have to say grace before we eat," one of the children, a green-haired one with a candle hat, told the visitor.

"Oh. Sorry." She put her spoon down, flushing a little in embarrassment.

"That's quite alright, Miss Webster. Every family's dinner routine is different." Felix clasped his hands in front of him, and his wife and children did the same. Anna hesitated before clasping her own.

"Dear Lord, we thank you for this food, and for bringing us all here together to enjoy it as a family. We also thank you for bringing us Anna Webster, our delightful new guest, and for delivering her safely from the web to our happy little arcade. We hope she will enjoy her stay as much as we will enjoy having her here."

"Okay, wow," Anna thought. She'd never been welcomed to a game like this before. Most of the time, the first thing out of characters' mouths when she appeared before them was, "Oh, shit," or "You goddamn bitch" because they knew she was there to annihilate their game and spare only the innocent ones. She had once found that deliciously satisfying, especially if the game she was about to delete from the web was one that tormented and abused underage Japanese schoolgirls or tricked young, gullible players into giving them their banking information. Now, after hearing Felix's warm speech of neighbourly goodness, she wasn't sure she would be able to enjoy that quite as much anymore.

When she met Wreck-It Ralph later that evening, she recognized him instantly from his series of BuzzTube videos, which she and everyone else on the web had seen. She couldn't stop herself from thinking about "Open Sesabees" and ended up bursting into a girlish fit of giggles. Luckily, Ralph was a good sport about it, and grinned at her.

"Which video are you thinking about?" he asked.

She managed to sputter out, between titters, "The bees."

He laughed. "It's _always_ the bees!"

"I'm really sorry," she said, wiping a tear from her eye with her thumb. "I won't laugh anymore. I'll stop." She managed to steady herself for a full three seconds before Ralph started making a buzzing noise under his breath, and then she was howling and clutching her sides again. Ralph caught her contagious laugh like a virus and was soon cracking up too.

"Well, they seem to have hit it off," Felix remarked to his wife. He was glad to see Ralph laughing with someone. Ever since Vanellope had left Litwak's, that had become a rare sight.

* * *

"So what did you say her name was again?" Vanellope asked Ralph over the phone.

"Anna Webster," Ralph answered, feeling a little giddy as he said the newcomer's name aloud. This was the first time a visitor from the web had really caught his interest. Most of them were snooty or just plain annoying, but not Anna Webster. She was different. He could tell.

Vanellope snorted. _"That's_ a boring name."

"Well, _sorry_ , not everyone gets to be named something like Lollipants von Nosepicker," he pointed out. Vanellope laughed.

"What's she doing at Litwak's?" she asked.

"Writing. She's working on a book or something and needs quiet. She says the internet's too distracting."

"Fair enough. The best form of entertainment Litwak's has right now is you burping the alphabet."

"That's what you think. I'm taking her on a tour around the arcade later after work. You think I can't show a girl a good time?"

"Awwwww, Ralphie has a wittle crush!" Vanellope teased. Ralph blushed a little at that, because Vanellope had hit a mark. Felix called it "the honeyglows" but what Anna had made Ralph feel when he met her felt more like a dizzy spell. He hoped her stay at Litwak's wouldn't be as short as she'd told Felix it would be. He needed more time to get her to like him. He really, really wanted her to like him, and not just for some ridiculous BuzzTube videos.

* * *

Anna thoroughly enjoyed Ralph's tour of the arcade. There were so many old games, she hadn't even realized half of them still existed. On the internet, "the newer, the better," was the creed, but not in an arcade, where the retro aesthetic reigned supreme. She liked it. She liked it a lot. She almost felt like she fit in.

"And here we have Tron," Ralph concluded as he led her to the entrance. "We could go in, but I have to warn you, there's a bit of a virus."

Her interest was piqued at once. "What kind of virus?"

"It makes you freeze while you drive." The Tron characters were making the best of it. Their favorite thing to do now was to snap a picture of the frozen, trapped characters before helping them down. He and Vanellope had made the wall last time they were there. It had been a good laugh then, but now he decided that he'd rather _not_ be humiliated in front of the cute new girl like that. "You know what? Let's just skip it. You've probably seen a version of it on the web anyway. Tron's timeless."

That was true. Tron was timeless. But _this_ Tron was infected. Anna couldn't help herself. Her hacker fingers itched desperately for a task. She had been idle for too long. She had to fix it.

Distracting Surge Protector so she could enter the game was an easy matter. A couple quick taps on her laptop, and Game Central Station's lights went off, enveloping the wandering characters in darkness.

"Nobody panic!" Surge Protector cried out. Nobody was panicking. Everybody was just confused. "Nobody move, either! I'll have the lights up and running again in a jiffy—"

The lights went on again before he could finish, just as Anna ducked into Tron's entrance, unseen and undetected. She had special software on her laptop that allowed her to hack into any game without going into the code room. The only issue was finding a concealing spot to sit in a game that had no hiding spots whatsoever. Eventually, she had to settle for climbing into one of the cars and hacking in while it drove.

She put the car on autopilot and let it cruise her around the borders of the racing floor, so she wouldn't touch the faulty spot. She travelled the entire length of the game only three times with her laptop in her lap. Fixing Tron's virus was so easy, it was disappointing. It was such a basic virus, it only took a grand total of four and a half minutes to vanquish. She'd been hoping for more of a challenge. She was a little bit sulky on her way back to her rented townhouse in Fix-It Felix Jr. Fortunately, Ralph was there to cheer her up, and cheer her up he did. By juggling bricks.

"I feel like I should be filming you," she remarked as she watched him go at it. "How many BuzzTube hearts do you think this would get?"

"I'd trade ten million BuzzTube hearts for yours," Ralph involuntarily thought, and said thought made him painfully drop a brick on his foot. As Anna ran back into her house to get him ice, he chided himself for being such a blasted doofus.

Word got out quickly that Tron was fixed. The characters insisted it was not their doing, and that they had no idea whose it was. Rumors began to spread, but not a single one led back to Fix-It Felix Jr.'s inoffensive-looking boarder. Someone even jokingly suggested that the ghost of Turbo had done it, as atonement for his crimes.

"Litwak must have had someone come in overnight to fix it," Ralph told Anna while they were at Tappers. "No one saw any repairman come in."

"I'm sure that's exactly what happened." She kept her eyes squarely on her laptop screen, not daring to look him in the face, lest she reveal something.

"It's funny. That virus has been there for ages and no one's done a thing about it!" Ralph went on. "I told you about that virus just yesterday and suddenly, it's gone! It's almost as if you're a…"

Anna froze, fingers suspended above her keyboard. _Oh, shit. Oh, SHIT. He knows._

"…good luck charm!" Ralph finished. Anna inwardly sighed with relief.

"Ha ha, yeah. That's me. The good luck charm." She chuckled awkwardly, and quickly wiped away the beads of sweat that had formed on her forehead and dampened her bangs before going back to her typing. "Just spreading good luck all over the place."

Repairing Tron had made Anna realize something. She needed a project or she was going to go mad with boredom in this arcade. Granted, Ralph was being very good to her, taking her out and about during the free hours and introducing her to people, but he worked during the day, as did everyone else except for her. She had to think of something to do. There had to be something else in the arcade she could fix. Or, if not that, there had to be something she could improve.

Adding new tracks to Sugar Rush was a notion that came to her by accident. When she was once again invited to the main building for dinner, the Fix-It children were much more open with her, and over dessert they reconstructed their game's best track for her with their bowls of ice cream sundaes and candy toppings.

"Our game only has, like, five tracks," Taffyta informed her. "We'd show you the other two, but Mom and Dad don't let us bring gumballs into the apartment."

"Yeah, because Gloyd thought it would be fun to do gum wad spitball practice on Dad's wall of medals," Rancis added. "Thanks, _Gloyd."_

"Thanks, kids," Anna thought elatedly. She had a project now. During the day, she would put her skills to work making these funny little munchkins a new track. It was perfect. She wouldn't even have to mess with the lights in Game Central Station to go to Sugar Rush. She could just tell Surge that she was visiting her hosts' children, and he would have to believe her and let her pass through.

She visited Sugar Rush a few times and discreetly jotted down some notes before she hit the drawing board. She got a fantastic idea as she watched the racers bounce around on the trampolines their parents had set up for them in Fix-It Felix Jr. _What if they could do that in their karts?_ Her mind began to race faster than any of them ever had.

It took her three days to design the track. Each day, she climbed up one of the candy cane trees and perched herself on a branch so that no one could sneak up behind her and see what she was doing. If anyone spotted her and asked why she was typing away so furiously, she would simply say that she'd had a spark of inspiration from Sugar Rush's splendid scenery for her "writing."

Luckily for her, no one bothered her at all, and soon she had the entire track all mapped out, down to the very last detail. On her laptop, she tested the track with a simulation racer several times before deeming it ready for action and pressing "Add to Program." All at once the track manifested itself in Sugar Rush in a sweeping wave of code, and she was immensely pleased to see that it matched her blueprints precisely. She had to lock it up, though. New racetracks couldn't just appear out of nowhere, there had to be an explanation for it. She felt a tad crestfallen as she watched her hard work vanish like a magician's trick. Oh well. It would reappear again soon. It was only a matter of time.

* * *

Anna sat on the rooftop of Fix-It Felix Jr.'s main building, watching Sugar Rush with her binoculars. A skilled player was racing with Taffyta. She'd arranged things so that the player only needed to make it to third place to unlock the new track.

"Come on, come on…" The player made it to second place. "Yes!"

The player was just as excited as Anna was when the words _"You've unlocked a new track!"_ flashed on the console's screen. They called over their friends to come see. The Sugar Rush characters, however, were just plain baffled.

"I thought we unlocked all the tracks already," Candlehead whispered to her friends.

"Me too. What's going on?" Rancis replied nervously.

"This had better not be one of Ralph's 'tracks,'" Taffyta spat. Whatever it was, they were about to find out, because the player was already shoving quarters in for another race.

The racers were terrified at first when they discovered that the new track required them to bounce their way across a field of ginormous Jell-O cubes that had suddenly appeared in Sugar Rush out of nowhere. But as soon as they tried it, and they were ecstatic. It was so much fun!

" _Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"_ squealed Candlehead with delight as she bounced from cube to cube in her kart, trying to catch up with Taffyta. Anna noticed that one of her cubes had a bit of a wonky shape. She would have to go in later and adjust it.

"Hey, what's going on?" Ralph asked as he joined Anna on the roof. "What's so fascinating out there?"

"Take a look," Anna said, offering Ralph the binoculars. He looked. And his mouth dropped open.

"Whaaaaaaat?! When did Sugar Rush get a new track?!"

"Just now."

"But Vanellope unlocked all the tracks!" Ralph felt like an old wound had been reopened inside him. Vanellope had wanted new tracks, and he'd tried so hard to give her one. His had failed spectacularly, but this one was doing just fine. More than fine. Racers and players alike looked like they were having a blast. And Vanellope wasn't there to enjoy it.

"Are you okay?" Anna concernedly asked Ralph, who swallowed down a hard lump in his throat.

"Y-Yeah, I'm fine," he lied, passing the binoculars back. "The track looks great."

"Doesn't it?!" Anna exclaimed excitedly, but then retracted herself. She couldn't give herself away over a kiddie racing game. Still, she couldn't help but be thrilled with her track's success. For sure she would have to make another, and soon.

* * *

"Was this here before?" Wynchel asked the others after work, as they stood on a cliffside, looking down on the Jell-O field. Several racers and citizens were happily bouncing and doing flips on the giant Jell-O cubes like children in a bouncy castle at a birthday party. "Do you guys remember this?"

"I don't know," Duncan answered. "But I'm going in!"

The doughnut cop threw off his police hat and sunglasses and cannonballed off the cliff while shouting "Woo-hoo!" He landed on a Jell-O cube and started bouncing up and down like a gleeful child. Wynchel, after a moment's hesitation, shrugged and took off his hat and sunglasses as well to join him.

"Come on, Bill!" Beard Papa cried as he pushed the sour candy ball towards the edge. Sour Bill yelped in protest but it was in vain. He and his bearded colleague landed on the same cube and were instantly rocketed off to another. Beard Papa was whopping with childish joy, while Sour Bill got to experience what it was like to be a pinball in a pinball machine, which was something he'd, admittedly, been wondering for a long time.

* * *

" _You've unlocked a new track!"_ cried the announcer's voice. A collective gasp of shock and awe swept through the inhabitants of Sugar Rush.

"Another one?!" exclaimed Sergeant Calhoun and Felix in unison. Below, at the starting point, their children were practically hyperventilating with excitement.

"I hope it's more Jell-O!" Candlehead cried out. All the others had their hopes up as well. _Please, please, please be as good as the last one!_

The signs Anna had set up led the racers to Diet Cola Mountain, which welcomed them with a flashing entranceway. The hacker had discovered the unfinished track while casually browsing through Sugar Rush's code web, searching for another potential location for building. This one had been much easier to make than the last. It took less than a day. The framework of the track was set up already. It was only a matter of strengthening the ramp, adding a few extra gimmicks, and testing it with a simulation. Much to the Felix and Sergeant Calhoun's initial horror, the track ended with the volcano exploding and blasting the racers up into the sky, where the player had to strategically land them on a ramp that spiralled around the _outside_ of the mountain and led them back to the main roads. But no one was hurt. Anna had dramatically reduced the heat of the lava. It was now basically the temperature of lukewarm bath water. It didn't even melt an ice cube.

The racers loved it. The players loved it. Mr. Litwak especially loved it. Sugar Rush hadn't raked in so many quarters in years. Now players were lining up for a turn.

Over the course of three weeks, four more new tracks appeared in Sugar Rush, each with a completely different design and series of challenges that still blended into the game's candy land theme. The conclusion everyone eventually came to was that Sugar Rush had experienced some sort of upgrade while none of them were paying attention. What other explanation was there, except for some benevolent guardian angel blessing their game?

"Man, did Vanellope pick the wrong time to jump ship!" Rancis exclaimed. "These new tracks are amazing!"

"Hey, Ralph, do us all a big favor," Taffyta told the wrecker. "Don't try to 'add on' to these tracks. They're perfect as they are. Please and thank you."

Ralph couldn't even argue with the bad-mouthed brat. The tracks really were perfect, in every way. There hadn't been a single accident on any of them since they'd appeared.

"Vanellope was the best racer here. She should have unlocked these," he thought sadly, and also a little furiously. Just his damn luck that Vanellope would get bored and game-jump right before a major upgrade. These new tracks might have kept her entertained and rooted at Litwak's a few years longer.

"I'm really sorry, Ralph," Anna said when he confessed his woes to her at in Tapper's later that evening. She really was sorry. She'd hadn't realized Sugar Rush had so much murky and tragic history. She'd just been trying to make the kids happy.

'Why are you sorry? You had nothing to do with it." He had no idea. She had everything to do with it. She wondered how he would react if she told him she'd made the tracks. She wondered how he'd react if she told him she was the reason Shank was able to program Vanellope into Slaughter Race as a regular NPC.

She never found out because she didn't tell him. She couldn't. Anna Webster was a harmless writer, not an ace wizard of coding. She couldn't blow her cover. She bought him another root beer instead, and let him rant to her a bit more. She hoped that made up for things, just a little.

* * *

It took Anna only a few minutes to pack up her clothes and gear. It all fit in one bag. She zipped it up and locked it. There, all ready to go.

An ally, a fellow hacker from the web, had messaged her and warned her that her pursuers were beginning to suspect where she was. She had to leave Litwak's Arcade quickly. She couldn't endanger the inhabitants, not after they'd been so kind to her.

"I'm so tired of running," she thought wearily as she stared at her bulging pack. But what other choice did she have? It was either run or be captured by those who would use her for world-dismantling ends. They would torture her until she agreed, or kill her if she kept on saying no. Keeping one step ahead of them was the only other option.

"I'm going to miss this place," she thought sadly as she took one last final look around Fix-It Felix Jr. on her way out. For the past several weeks, Litwak's had felt like the closest thing to a home that she'd had in a long time, and it pained her to think she would probably never be able to return. The characters from Tron would never know it was her who fixed their game. The Sugar Rush characters would never know it was her who'd programmed them the new tracks. That was all well and good. She wasn't looking for a thank you or praise. But she would have liked to have done more for the arcade that had sheltered her.

"Goodbye, Ralph," she thought regretfully as she passed by his shack for the last time. She was sorry to part ways with him like this, without a proper farewell, and without an explanation. He was a very sweet man and she liked him a lot. No one had made her laugh so much in a very long time. But she couldn't get him involved in the endless cat-and-mouse game that was her life. It was too dangerous, and from what she'd heard, the poor guy had already faced enough danger in his life. Hopefully, he would have the good sense to forget about her.

She considered leaving him a note, but ultimately decided against it. She couldn't leave behind any trace of herself except what she'd done to the games. Nothing that offered a glimpse of who she was as a person. However, as a kind gesture, she hacked into Fix-It Felix Jr. and made the game just a tad harder to beat, so that Ralph would be thrown into the mud less often. That was the best she could do for him. She also deleted Nicelander Gene's home bar and cellar of fine wines, because she'd overheard him saying something awful about Ralph. That obnoxious drunk was going to wake up to a rude surprise. The rest of the arcade was just going to wake up to find her gone.

* * *

"Hey, Anna, how's it going?" Ralph practiced on his way back to Fix-It Felix Jr. "Listen, I was wondering if, on Friday night or Saturday night or whenever, if you don't already have plans, you'd like a catch a movie on Netflix with me? You can choose the movie. I'm down for anything. Even the rom-coms."

He knew how stupid he sounded. A big, bumbling fool, that's what he was. _Confidence, Ralph, Show confidence._ That was what Zangief and the others had told him at the book club, where the book of the week was Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina._ Ironically, they all ended up discussing another Anna instead.

"I've never asked anyone out before," Ralph admitted to his friends. "I'm not gonna lie. I'm kind of freaking out about this."

"She seems like a pretty down-to-earth girl," remarked Sonic, who had met Ralph's object of affection several times. "Just be casual about it. 'Hey, I've known you for weeks now and I think you're cool. Wanna go out sometime?' No need to be a big cheeseball about it."

"Since when I am a big cheeseball?!" the already-anxious wrecker exclaimed.

Sonic smirked. "No offense, Ralph, but you're the biggest cheeseball I know. Not saying that's a bad thing, but modern women like a more, well, _chill_ class of men."

"It's all about confidence, Ralph," Zangief gently advised him. "And be honest with your feelings and intentions. You really like this girl. Make sure that she knows that."

"I really like you, Anna," Ralph went on to himself as he neared the entrance to his game. "And I'm not just saying that because you liked all my videos. I really like _you,_ and how fun and open you are to everything. I know we haven't had much time to get to know each other yet, but I'd really like to know more about you. In fact, I'd like to know everything about you—"

He nearly collided with another character as the lights in Game Central Station suddenly shut down. "Not again!" cried the Surge Protector in frustrated dismay. "Nobody move!"

Ralph couldn't see anything in the blinding blackness. He couldn't see Anna pass right by him, adorned with night vision goggles and carrying everything she owned on her back. She turned her head to look at him one last time, silently sending another apology for unintentionally sabotaging his friendship with Vanellope. If she ever saw him again, under safer circumstances, she would tell him the truth, and ask him to forgive her.

The lights soon went back on, and Ralph was stricken with an unsettling feeling of foreboding. Meanwhile, Anna was already on her way back to the internet, moving abnormally slow through the cord with her laptop on her lap. She had intentionally stalled the warping process so she would have just enough time to alter her usual NetUser disguise to that of Litwak Arcade's night janitor. If anyone was waiting for her on the warp pad, she would be able to trick them and evade them easily.

It worked. She landed as a typical NetUser and no one was the wiser. With her face frozen in a blank, stoic expression, she blended into the crowd of avatars and vanished. The lookout her pursuers had placed near the pad reported to his superiors that so far there was no trace of "The Gold Spider" (7H3 60LD 5P1D3R).

"Keep waiting," ordered his boss. "She'll have to leave eventually. We'll get her then. She can't outrun us forever. She'll join our little project whether she likes it or not."

"Can't we just find another hacker?" the lookout asked tiredly. They'd been chasing The Gold Spider for what felt like forever. And every time, no matter how close they got to capturing her, she slipped out of their grasp, through the tiniest crack in the wall like the sneaky little insect she was. It was getting exhausting. He wasn't the only one who thought so, but his and his colleagues' head honcho's pursuit of the girl-hacker had become an all-consuming obsession that bordered on Moby Dick-level madness.

"No. Stay where you are. That's an order." And that was that. The lookout stayed put, arms crossed, foot tapping, waiting for someone suspicious-looking to land on the pad from Litwak's Arcade. Someone did eventually land, within the hour, but it was a barefooted giant in overalls who fell flat on his face upon impact.

"Anna?!" he cried out as soon as he jumped to his feet. He cupped his ginormous hands around his face and shouted out. "Anna?! Where you are?!"

"Oh, hey, it's the 'Open Sesabees' guy," the lookout thought, chuckling to himself. He watched the BuzzTube star run around the pad, stopping everyone who wasn't a NetUser to ask them the same desperate question. Had they seen a young brunette woman in her mid-twenties come through? He got the same negative answer every time, and his search only become more and more frantic.

"Tough luck, buddy," the lookout thought as he watched what was clearly an abandoned suitor realizing he'd been abandoned. Ralph, who didn't realize he was also being watched, dashed over to Knowsmore's stand to make one final ditch attempt to find the girl of his dreams.

"Hey, Egghead, I need you to find someone for me. Anna Webster. Search."

"I have found twenty-six results for your query," the Netizen announced after his usual digital spasm. Ralph swiped through them quickly, frowning with dissatisfaction as he did so.

"No, no, no, no…these are all women from the real world! I'm looking for an Anna Webster who lives on the internet."

"Oh!" exclaimed Knowsmore. "Well, in that case, there are zero results for your query."

"Try again," Ralph demanded. Knowsmore did so, and shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Wreck-It, but there is no one named Anna Webster who resides on the world wide web."

"That can't be right!" Ralph insisted. He made Knowsmore try again, and again, and then one more time, until finally he admitted defeat.

"Aw, Ralph, I'm really sorry," Vanellope said when they conferenced on the phone later that night, back in Game Central Station. To lighten to the mood, she tried to joke, "She must've heard you were coming for her and changed her name."

Ralph's expression was everything _but_ amused. It was angry and wounded and disappointed. "I really liked her," he confessed.

"Maybe she'll come back," Vanellope suggested.

"Why would she come back? She left without saying goodbye!" The bad guy buried his head in his free hand and groaned. "I can't have anything, can I?! I was going to ask her out on a date! It's taken me weeks to work up the courage! And what happens?! She disappears like some sort of _ghost!_ Right when I'm about to ask her!"

He felt like crying. He felt like punching a wall. He felt like punching a wall _while_ crying. Vanellope could feel his distress through the phone signal and wished she were there to hug him.

"Come visit me soon. I'll cheer you up." She doubted that she could, though. This wasn't Ralph's first time being heartbroken, but it was his first time being in love. Whoever this Anna Webster was, she'd done a cruel job on him, as if she'd gone into Fix-It Felix Jr.'s code room, reached into his code box, and ripped out his heart like a malicious virus.

Vanellope didn't know much about grownup dating junk, but she knew what it was like to watch your dreams disappear. And Ralph's dream was now anywhere on the web, under some new made-up name, befriending some new poor sucker who, like him, would be left at the end of the day with too many unanswered questions and a whole lot of unresolved emotions.

* * *

 **End of Story**

* * *

I hoped you enjoyed me tearing your heart out. Now leave a review or I'll do worse.


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